‘Sunshine’ chugging to La Jolla Playhouse

Musical will be based on offbeat Oscar winner

LA JOLLA PLAYHOUSE'S UPDATED SEASON

Here’s the updated lineup for La Jolla Playhouse’s 2010-11 season. (The theater also will announce an additional musical for this fall, to replace the postponed “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder.”)

• “Surf Report,” June 15 to July 11: San Diego native Annie Weisman (“Be Aggressive”) returns to the Playhouse with this world-premiere piece.

One of the most intriguing musical projects of the past few seasons is on its way to La Jolla Playhouse — and it’ll trundle in on the tires of a dusty VW bus.

The Playhouse is announcing today that come February 2011, it will stage the world premiere of “Little Miss Sunshine,” a show based on the Oscar-winning 2006 movie about an oddball family and their would-be pageant princess.

The adapters are two prominent Broadway names, both with some local history. James Lapine, a three-time Tony-winner who also landed a Pulitzer Prize for the 1984 musical “Sunday in the Park With George,” is writing the new show’s book and will direct. (His latest show, “Sondheim on Sondheim,” just opened in New York.)

William Finn, who wrote book, music and lyrics for the Tony-winning “Falsettos” (directed by Lapine) and also is the composer-lyricist behind the hit “25th Putnam County Spelling Bee,” will write the “Little Miss Sunshine” score and lyrics.

Playhouse artistic director Christopher Ashley says he felt the project was an ideal fit for the theater the moment he heard of it a couple of years ago.

“I love that film,” Ashley says. “I think the film is so demented and unexpected and wry and ultimately heartwarming, and then demented again. The tone of the film is brilliant, and the characters are so interesting and so rich.”

He also appreciated that the creative team has some ties to the Playhouse. Lapine directed a revival of the Stephen Sondheim-composed “Merrily We Roll Along” for La Jolla in 1985 (four years after it flopped on Broadway), and his play “Luck, Pluck and Virtue” premiered there in 1993. (In 1996, Lapine and Sondheim premiered “Into the Woods” at the Old Globe Theatre; it went on to become a Tony-winning Broadway hit.)

The film “Little Miss Sunshine,” which earned an Oscar for Michael Arndt’s screenplay, follows the motley, feuding Hoover family as they drive cross-country in their battered VW, intent on getting little Olive into a children’s beauty pageant. Tolerating (much less understanding) each other proves a hard road, but all wind up learning a thing or two about love and loss.

Ashley says the producers of the movie played an active role in getting the stage project rolling.

“I think the film’s producers really felt, rightly in my opinion, that there’s a wonderful musical to be had there,” Ashley says. “They were really crucial in getting together the creative team and shepherding (the work) to La Jolla Playhouse.

“They’ve also smartly given a lot of creative latitude to James and Bill. At no point were they trying to recapture that same lightning in a bottle, and make it the same thing as the film. They’ve been great about saying, ‘We hope this story inspires you, but really, make it your own thing.’ ”

Several of the movie’s actors have Broadway experience, leaving open the (maybe small) possibility that some could reprise their roles onstage.

Toni Collette, who played the flustered Hoover matriarch, was Tony-nominated for “The Wild Party” in 2000. The now 14-year-old Abigail Breslin, who had a star-making film turn as Olive, was in the (short-lived) revival of “The Miracle Worker” that just closed on Broadway.

Alan Arkin, who played the movie’s loose-cannon grandpa, won a Tony way back in 1963 for “Enter Laughing,” and Paul Dano, who portrayed Olive’s sullen older brother, has done two Broadway shows. (The latter three actors have more experience in straight plays than in musicals.)

“It’s absolutely been talked about as one of many options,” Ashley says of the possibility of cast returnees. although he emphasizes it’s still very early in the casting process.

Two things are certain, says Ashley, who happened to be a young intern at Playwrights Horizons in New York when Lapine was workshopping “George” there: The new musical “is still going to focus very much around the road trip. And the Volkswagen will be a major part of the staging as well. It’s good to have an iconic prop.”

Time will tell if that bus will run circles around the “Miss Saigon” helicopter or the “Phantom of the Opera” chandelier, but as the show’s ever-upbeat Olive would insist, anything’s possible.